Through their retail tech platform, Natasha Buchler and Annie Rudnick are also shining a light on Africa’s unsung, talented artists.



IF YOU WANT TO change the world, start with Africa. While that seems to be the prevailing mantra for the new world, it was what Natasha Buchler wanted too – to impact lives on the continent whilst also promoting homegrown talent.



In 2016, she was working as a senior director at K2 Intelligence, when she planned the launch of her new charity, Bella Teaching Foundation, an initiative to provide free skills training to unemployed youth in Ghana.



At the time, the dream to start a movement that would empower 43 designers and impact the lives of over 8,000 people across the African continent was unfathomable. Fast forward a few years and that is exactly what she has achieved with her co-founder Annie Rudnick, with the launch of Akojo Market, a platform in the United Kingdom selling handmade accessories, homeware, gifts, and fashion.



“Akojo means ‘collective’ or ‘a collection’ in Yoruba. For us, it really encompasses what we want to create, which is a community and a collection of beautiful handmade and artisanal products across Africa. Ninety percent of our designers are in sub-Saharan Africa,” says Buchler to FORBES AFRICA.



When they launched in April 2019, they only had 10 designers and since then, the platform has garnered interest, growing to 43 designers, with between five and 15 products per brand. Buchler met Rudnick, originally from Zimbabwe, when they were both in school, and years later, their complementary experiences are what has made Akojo Market what it is today.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignleft size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screenshot-2021-08-19-at-14.48.54.png" alt="" class="wp-image-52214" width="432" height="254" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screenshot-2021-08-19-at-14.48.54.png 486w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screenshot-2021-08-19-at-14.48.54-300x177.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 432px) 100vw, 432px" /></figure></div>



Rudnick, with a background in the history of art and communications for major international art galleries, brings the curation and representation-of-artists element to the brand with an overview of product selection as well as the website’s aesthetics, while Buchler, having had a brief stint in business intelligence where she was responsible for working on behalf of financial institutions, international partners and high networth individuals, handles the due diligence, ethics and compliance components of the business. At the core of the company is its vision to be a leading platform for talented artisans and designers to sell their products internationally.



“We really wanted to work with brands that were doing amazing things in terms of people and planet and working with the supply chain to make sure that the artists and artisans are more than paid and they don’t have to leave villages to take up degrading work in urban areas,” says Buchler.



Over the years, traditional craft, which is the lifeline for most rural communities across Africa, has been gradually dying out and is not as lucrative as it once was. So Buchler and Rudnick came up with a plan to become a third-party tech enabler to help indigenous artisans 



continue supporting their families and communities through the Akojo platform.



“We have identified that there are some serious problems in the retail supply chain not only across the world but in sub-Saharan Africa and there is exploitation, cultural appropriation and mistreatment of workers and that is from both a people and environmental perspective.”



When these vices are left unchecked, Buchler believes talented designers find it difficult to generate income. What subsequently happens is that these artists are forced into a system of exploitation.



To combat this, the duo has made sustainability and compliance an imperative component of the platform.



“We do not dilute this because our customers really trust the brands we are selling and believe in our ethics and sustainability credentials and also shine a light on talented artists in Africa. We are super passionate about that because there is so much work to be done and brilliant creativity to bring to the fore,” says Buchler.



Part of this ethical and sustainability focus means that Akojo ensures artisans are paid a minimum wage or above and there is a focus on long- term work for the brands they represent. The platform also operates a dropshipping model so provides a continuous flow of orders for the brands they represent.



“We look at things like human rights being upheld in the supply chain and a lot of communication about safety in their workshops and freedom of speech and general respect for people and what they need or may not need; the sustainability aspect like ‘are they using recycled materials or packaging, are they minimizing the use of chemical dyes, are they considerate about transporting products from A to B, and how can we help them do that?’ We as a company offset our carbon footprint and do that by working with a company called Nula Carbon, which has Kenyan origins, and we calculate our carbon footprint and carbon dioxide emissions.”



Akojo’s revenue model is also transparent, they add. The company charges a commission of 25% as well as a minimal joining fee to cover getting their brands’ products on the platform. They provide brand consultancy work as well as marketing and PR in addition to what the platform offers as a basic service. The major challenge is finding a cost- effective way of delivering products globally.



“Our main challenge is logistics. It is very expensive to ship products to and from Africa. We work with DHL and they have been very helpful and have a huge drive to support e-commerce in sub-Saharan Africa but it’s still expensive. The second challenge is to help businesses scale but still retain the ethical and sustainable component of their supply chain; making sure that they produce more products and they can still source the fabrics and they don’t have to import it from China,” says Buchler.



With the current brands, Akojo is working with 800 to 1,000 artisans across their supply chains, bringing long-term incomes to their families. After two years of trading, the company is committed to go against the grain of the wholesale model where fashion retailers pick up products inexpensively in Africa and mark it up significantly for the international market.

Screenshot 2021-08-19 at 17.27.23

Designs On Africa: How to Impact Lives While Promoting Homegrown Talent

TOPLINE: Top infectious disease official Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday highlighted the importance of the U.S. quickly gaining control of the delta variant, warning continued community spread could lead to even more dangerous mutations of Covid-19, including those capable of evading the protection of vaccines.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h2>



“That will happen, George, if we don’t get good control over the community spread,” Fauci told “Good Morning America” anchor George Stephanopoulos during a Thursday interview on ABC News.&nbsp;



Allowing the virus to spread through unvaccinated populations—as it is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2021/08/03/florida-shatters-record-for-covid-hospitalization-again-as-desantis-downplays-crisis/">doing</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2021/07/31/us-reports-almost-200000-new-covid-cases-in-worst-spike-since-january/">rapidly</a>&nbsp;now—gives it “ample opportunity to mutate,” explained President Biden’s top medical advisor.&nbsp;



“You may sooner or later get another variant, and it is possible that that variant might be in some respects worse than the already difficult variant we’re dealing with now,” Fauci said, referencing the delta variant, which experts say is significantly more infectious than other coronavirus strains.



He also emphasized that the virus can mutate regardless of whether people contracting the virus get symptoms.&nbsp;



Vaccines may be effective at preventing serious disease and death with Covid-19’s current mutations, but this may not necessarily be true with future evolutions, Fauci emphasized.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-chief-critic">CHIEF CRITIC</h2>



“People who say, ‘I don’t want to get vaccinated because it’s me and I’ll worry about me, I’m not having any impact on anybody else,’ that’s just not the case,” Fauci said.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-tangent">TANGENT&nbsp;</h2>



Fauci’s warning came as Moderna&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/moderna-says-its-covid-19-shot-remains-93-effective-4-6-months-after-second-dose-2021-08-05/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced</a>&nbsp;Thursday morning its Covid-19 shot is about 93% effective through six months after the second dose. Pfizer in July said the effectiveness of its jab steadily declines to about 84% six months after the final dose. Both vaccine makers have said they expect booster shots to be necessary ahead of the winter season, particularly due to the threat of the delta variant.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-background">KEY BACKGROUND&nbsp;</h2>



The delta variant is driving surges in Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations that haven’t been seen since the early stages of the U.S.’s vaccine rollout. More than 51,000 Americans are now hospitalized with Covid-19, an 87% increase from two weeks ago, and cases have increased 131% to a daily average of nearly 100,000 during the same period, according to data&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">compiled by The New York Times</a>. Deaths have also shot up (by 65%) over the past two weeks, but—at 410—are still well below the country’s winter peak. Fauci has said while it’s “unquestionable” the delta variant is more infectious, it is “less clear” whether it actually causes more serious disease.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-to-watch-for">WHAT TO WATCH FOR&nbsp;</h2>



Fauci warned in an <a href="https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/coronavirus/article253248688.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">interview</a> with McClatchy on Wednesday the U.S. could begin reporting between 100,000 and 200,000 new cases each day if safety precautions and vaccinations don’t increase. “Remember, just a couple of months ago, we were having about 10,000 cases a day,” Fauci said. There are hopeful signs: After months of decline, the number of Americans getting the shot has been steadily increasing. White House Covid-19 data director Cyrus Shahpar <a href="https://twitter.com/cyrusshahpar46/status/1422226019260370947" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced</a> Tuesday, as the U.S. surpassed a 70% partial inoculation rate, that the seven-day average of newly vaccinated people (441,000) was the highest in more than a month.



By Jemima McEvoy, Forbes Staff

Dr. Fauci Testifies To Senate Health Committee On Country’s COVID-19 Response

Fauci: Failure To Control Delta Variant Could Lead To ‘Worse’ Mutations That Evade Vaccines

The scene is not picture-perfect yet, but ace photographers are slowly capturing the creative market in Ghana.



WHEN THE iconic Ghanaian photographer Emmanuel Bobbie, known widely by the moniker ‘Bob Pixel’, tragically passed away in February this year, the news sent shockwaves through the creative industry in Ghana. Bobbie had become a hero to a battery of young and upcoming Ghanaian photographers steadily following in his footsteps to build their own brands and enterprises, hoping to make it in the sector, a move exacerbated by the growing youth unemployment in the West African country. 



Bobbie was one of the pioneers and enablers of this transformation with his work celebrated both in Ghana and the world. His death reportedly attributed to Covid-19, turns the spotlight on the creative economy in Ghana. Whilst the pandemic has seen a renaissance of all things digital, it has also applied to the photography industry that now seems to be rapidly attracting a retinue of talented young men and women finding their feet in the once not-so-lucrative and unattractive sector. 



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:37% auto"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="683" height="1024" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Asante-683x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-51906 size-full" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Asante-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Asante-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Asante-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Asante-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Asante-1365x2048.jpg 1365w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Asante-scaled.jpg 1707w" sizes="(max-width: 683px) 100vw, 683px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">It becomes very difficult for a startup because unlike developed countries, where you get funding and co-funding, in Ghana, that did not exist and the systems are not right to enable you to set up. – Gilbert Asante</blockquote>
</div></div>



One such beneficiary of this growth is Gilbert Asante, who has been making an impression on social media and the corporate world with his photography.



Spotting a gap in the market for quality images when he began his career many years ago as a web designer, many of Asante’s photos have gone viral and been trend-setting in Ghana. 



Some of the biggest celebrities and corporate brands have queued up to the doorsteps of Laceup Media, the bespoke production house offering services covering every sphere of advertising, from graphic design to billboards, videography and commercials. 



Asante moonlights as a creative director for the company as well as being his own photography brand. 



“When I started, photography wasn’t a big thing as it is now. So, I would design a website with my team for a restaurant and the images [will be] terrible so it [would end] up making the website [look] very tacky. So that is what pushed me to invest in a camera. I just needed some decent photos. 



“At that time, there were no top photographers. So, I said ‘why don’t I take a camera and take a picture and add this to the website’. So, after that, things became curious in terms of ‘how do I make these pictures look like what I see in international publications’,” says Asante. 



His inspiration to delve deeper into the world of conceptual photography came about after a brief visit to the art centres of Japan. When he returned to Ghana, Asante knew he had found his calling. A self-taught photographer, he is now a name in the industry for his glamorous fashion shoots and out-of-the-box creative direction. But his success has been no walk in the park.



“The biggest issue I have is not based on photography but based on setting up a business in Ghana generally and that really cuts across all the sectors. It becomes very difficult for a startup because unlike developed countries, where you get funding and co-funding, in Ghana, that did not exist and the systems are not right to enable you to set up,” says Asante. 



While he was busy contending with these institutional issues, Elorm Ayayee pursued a career as a multilingual translator elsewhere. Fluent in French and Spanish, today, the founder of Elorm Ayayee Portraiture, a legacy portrait photography business in Ghana, was desperately searching for a career where she could make the most impact in the lives of people. 



“I was at a point in my career that I wasn’t making a contribution and I had worked myself into a system and at the core, I was against that. I don’t like being in a box or a cog in the wheel,” recalls Ayayee. 



Being a creative at heart, Ayayee went into publishing and worked as a ghostwriter for clients amongst many other things. 



“Photography was never on the horizon and never something I had considered… I came back to Ghana and was working with a company that did medical and surgical systems and I got married and had kids and then I realized that I had to make the call and I couldn’t have it all. I had to decide between my career and who I wanted to be as a family woman.” 



She made the tough decision to quit her career. 



“At that point, I had not been idle or jobless for over 20 years. I was always on the go and handling multiple things. I suddenly found myself with nothing to do. So, I took a trip to see my mum. One day, she had a program she had to go to and needed a photo of herself. It was the weekend and no one could do it and so she gave me my dad’s camera and I took a photo of her and until today, she says it is one of the best photos of her life.”



And just like that, Ayayee got hooked on photography. The Elorm Ayayee brand has been able to emerge as one of the top photography outlets in Ghana. Her popularity grew with time due to her ability to take captivating images of women, especially older women. 



“I immediately hooked on to what I thought my personal contribution would be. And that was birthed [by] seeing how my mother’s photo of herself impacted her and the other people and I said ‘this is my motivating factor’; seeing the way a woman sees herself when she looks at a photograph was amazing.” 



Both Ayayee and Asante are living proof of how lucrative the photography industry can be. But there is still a long way to go for upcoming talent. 



“A lot of people don’t see the business aspect of photography. There is so much big business from it and a lot of people don’t understand that and that is why they see photography as some job that is not going to give you so much security,” says Asante. 



For Ayayee, she knew the key to winning was to zone in on a specific demographic. 



“I was very clear about what I wanted to do. My niche was established when I started. I started out photographing women and I only took images of women above 50. And that kept me busy because I was offering a service that at the time didn’t really exist. I was very resolute about what type of images I wanted and my target audience,” says Ayayee. 



For Asante, on the other hand, the lack of any institutional investment meant he had to find other means to launch his business. 



“Laceup was started with about $4,000 which was money my partner and I put in at that time to purchase a few things. This was money I had saved from my previous work as a web designer. And my partner fielded the other half of it. It wasn’t that much in the beginning and we decided to build on that and make a lot of sacrifices in terms of the income coming in and how we could put it back in the business and make the company bigger. That is what helped us grow to the level we are now,” says Asante. 



Both Ayayee and Asante charge anywhere from $1,000 upwards depending on the packages they offer. 



“I didn’t start to be priced affordably because I was a mother of three and I had a limited amount of time. I felt like I had a very unparalleled skill-set which I translated into the cost I wished to receive for my work,” says Ayayee. 



The biggest hurdle in the photography business, according to Asante, is access to quality equipment. 



“All the equipment we use is imported. Every single one of them; even the backdrop paper we use for photography and that is difficult. We don’t even have servicing companies here so if cameras or equipment break down, you have to send it back to the UK and that was one of the biggest challenges we had in the beginning.” 



These are just some of the early-stage lessons they can impart to younger aspirants in the country. Zion Market Research estimated the global demand for digital photography at around $77.6 billion in 2015, projected to reach $110.8 billion by this year, and with so many young starry-eyed hopefuls still looking to make ends meet in Ghana, at least they have emerging role models who have looked through a more creative lens and proven that clicks can convert to cash.

Elom

Ghanaian Photographers On How Their Creative Businesses Click

There is a spot of Thailand in a bustling Johannesburg suburb, and its owner, Chef Micky, is giving private dining a whole new meaning.



FAR, FAR FROM THE PADDY FIELDS OF HER HOMETOWN IN Surin, a verdant province in northeastern Thailand also known for its temples and elephant festivals, young Thitiporn Liu flew into Johannesburg one bright promising day in 2004, with nothing more than a business plan in her head, her year-old daughter in her arms and some homegrown spices in her suitcases.



South Africa was a decade-old democracy, just waking up to the prospect of talent jetting in from the other side of the world. But there she was, Liu, lonely in big bustling Berea, a suburb adjacent to the Johannesburg central business district (CBD), setting up a small roadside eatery with nothing but a cheap plastic chair. She laughs at the memory now, when we meet her at her five-table restaurant named Chef Micky’s Thai Dining, in Birnam, next to the swanky Melrose Arch precinct in Johannesburg.



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“But people wanted my food so they still came. At that time, I didn’t have staff and [I was] doing everything myself,” says Liu, popularly known to her loyal patrons today as ‘Chef Micky’.



The moment you walk into her restaurant, you are immediately greeted by the heady scent of spices and incense, and a warm smile from Liu.



“I don’t know how to not feed someone,” she says. “If I can feed you, I like you.”



Born in Surin, surrounded by lotus fields and rice granaries and regaled by ceremonial elephant processions, Liu grew up loving food. 



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignleft size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screenshot-2021-07-07-at-09.55.38.png" alt="" class="wp-image-51727" width="273" height="304" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screenshot-2021-07-07-at-09.55.38.png 664w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screenshot-2021-07-07-at-09.55.38-269x300.png 269w" sizes="(max-width: 273px) 100vw, 273px" /></figure></div>



“To us, it is very normal. I would say about 70% of families in Thailand are in the cooking business.”



Having lost her mother at the age of three, her father, now late, influenced and cultivated her culinary skills.



“He would always take me to the best restaurants or take me places to try new things.”



Liu believes that her childhood played a prominent role in influencing her gastronomy which she showcases to her demanding clientele today. She studied home economics in Bangkok, the commercial heart of Thailand, and her loved ones had intended that she would take over the family business, which was incidentally, a restaurant. But little did anyone know that she would go on to create one of her own on another continent.



She started with a loan.



“If I tell you how scared I was to even use the money because I didn’t know how anything works…” Liu recalls about the early days in Johannesburg in 2004. “And I cooked one meal at a time… but my customers would not mind waiting. They would always say ‘oh no, don’t worry, we just want your food, take your time’.”



From a grimy corner of the CBD to Cyrildene, also a Johannesburg suburb, she worked as a chef at the Sai Thai Restaurant. Her skills got her due attention, as she won multiple awards, including the 2008 Dine Award and 2011 RASA Rosetta Award, both of which now adorn the walls of her restaurant in Birnam.



“There was even a point when I served people in my home,” she says, swiping through her phone to show you fond photographs of the private dining experiences she set up for customers in the lounge of her home.



Today, she continues to bring the soothing scent of jasmine rice, the swish of raw silk and the smell of the Surin coast to her culinary repertoire in Africa, which she has perfected over 17 years.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_5348-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-51730" width="513" height="342" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_5348-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_5348-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_5348-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_5348-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_5348-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 513px) 100vw, 513px" /></figure></div>



It is this personal connection that brings discerning diners from near and far to her unpretentious restaurant, even during the pandemic. There are no recipe books here; everything is “made from the heart”.



“I don’t cook my crab curry without thinking of my father who loved crab curry,” she says. “I feel this connection with him and I think that’s what makes my curry a favourite… I know my father is very proud of me.”



Johannesburg boasts over a dozen different Thai restaurants, all of which serve the staple soups, stirfries and seafood. But how is Liu’s menu different? 



First of all, you need to place the order from the menu a day in advance, which is a unique selling proposition by itself. This is to ensure the food, especially the fish, is fresh, flavorful and authentic. In a 2019 review, EAT OUT magazine noted that although Liu’s specialty fish dishes are “understandably pricier”, they are “worth it”.



Liu sits in her small restaurant surrounded by photographs, newspaper clippings and award certificates.



“There is more I have to put up. I just haven’t had the time,” she points out. She stands up to walk out to the modest garden she has created in front of the restaurant.



“It’s also because I only serve fresh ingredients,” she says, deftly cutting stalks of lemongrass that she grows on the muddy patch. People stop by to stare. It is a strange sight on the side of the road but their curiosity does not deter the resourceful chef.



“You can’t serve Thai cuisine without fresh ingredients,” she says, smiling at them.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignright size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_5446-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-51735" width="434" height="289" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_5446-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_5446-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_5446-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_5446-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_5446-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 434px) 100vw, 434px" /></figure></div>



A typical day for Liu begins at 6AM, when her 18-year-old daughter goes over the orders she has received on her phone the day before.Her daughter sits in the corner of the restaurant multi-tasking, doing her school work on the one hand as well as organizing the WhatsApp orders for her mother.



Liu’s staff can be seen hovering discreetly in the background, chopping vegetables, fish and meat for the dishes that Liu rustles up herself.



“I know what I want to put in my food. And remember, I cook everything from my heart,” says Liu again, stirring yet another signature dish of hers, a sweet and spicy prawn soup.



A normal day ends at 10.30PM, but she admits weekends are generally busier as people order up to seven dishes per table. The most sought-after items always are her crab curry and black pepper crab.



“People like coming to me for the seafood and I like making it more because it is fresher and that’s important to me.”



You can smell the spices and the fragrant lemongrass as she appears from the kitchen with a hot bowl of the soup she has been stirring up. The fresh prawn floating in the sumptuous broth is pink with perfection.



During the lockdown in Johannesburg, Liu says she missed the full-time action in the kitchen but pivoted to creating pre-packed recipes of some of her dishes for her customers to make at home. ‘This was fun because I got WhatsApp messages from people showing me what they cooked!



Walking out of Chef Micky’s Thai Dining as the late afternoon African sun begins to dip and the din of Johannesburg’s traffic starts to ebb away, you ask if she misses the tranquillity of her hometown in Thailand.



“No,” she says without blinking. “And I will tell you why. I feel like I bring something different here to Africa and South Africa.”

IMG_5307

The Chef Bringing Surin To South Africa

Elizabeth Isiorho is ramping up her modelling business to provide more young people international opportunities and put African beauty on the map.



COVID-19 MAY HAVE SHAKEN the very foundation of global fashion, but the one thing that has stayed is the focus on Africa as the world’s resource hub for the creative industry, with its surging youth dividend and gifted talent pool. 



Nigerian entrepreneur and former beauty queen Elizabeth Isiorho knows this only too well, as she takes her business to the next stage, now launching Future Face Africa, which she hopes will be a pan-African talent search to discover more African faces to showcase to the rest of the world. 



Her modeling agency, Beth Model Management Africa, has been at the forefront of this quest, since 2004, to provide a platform for African models abroad. 



“Models will be given a chance to win a two-year international modeling contract with a top modeling agency, offering hopefuls not just a launchpad but a career on the world stage,” she says in an interview with FORBES AFRICA over Zoom from London in May. 



Isiorho herself had her breakthrough in the industry with the international agency, Elite Model Management. But first, a look back at how it all began. Growing up, Isiorho was influenced by her mother, a veteran in the Nigerian entertainment industry and die-hard fashion lover who always told her daughter she resembled supermodel Naomi Campbell. 



Who knew then that Isiorho would become friends with Campbell several years later and follow in her role model’s footsteps? While African fashion and beauty is now celebrated abroad, this was not the case when Isiorho first started. Modelling had several negative perceptions in Africa that she needed to break. 



Born in London and relocating to the United Kingdom (UK) Isiorho studied Business and Information Technology at the London Guildhall University. With a passion for the modelling industry instilled in her from an early age, she began her career doing a few shows in London until a serendipitous encounter with a friend put her firmly on her destined path.



“A friend of mine showed me some magazines that had Miss Nigeria UK and she said I should go for it. I was extremely shy but I went for the 10-day boot camp and on the ninth day, I said ‘this is not for me, I’m not walking that stage in a bikini’ and I said to my mum ‘I am not doing it anymore’. My mum said she had bought her ticket to London to come and surprise me on stage so I should stick it out. I did and I won the competition, to my surprise,” recalls Isiorho.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignleft size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/image1-736x1024.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-51624" width="436" height="606" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/image1-736x1024.jpeg 736w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/image1-216x300.jpeg 216w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/image1-768x1068.jpeg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/image1-1104x1536.jpeg 1104w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/image1-1472x2048.jpeg 1472w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/image1-scaled.jpeg 1841w" sizes="(max-width: 436px) 100vw, 436px" /><figcaption>Photo by Adebayo Jolaoso</figcaption></figure></div>



After winning the pageant, Isiorho returned to Nigeria in 2003 to continue to build her career in the modeling industry. And that is where she noticed a glaring gap in the market. 



“Because I won Miss Nigeria UK, I was very popular when I came back to Nigeria and I said to myself ‘let me get a proper agency to manage me’. But there was none back then. I did my research and I went to companies and one company told me to just drop my CD. So, there was no modeling agency in Nigeria. I tried going to the big agencies in London that work with me today but I didn’t get far.”



Instead of giving up, she decided to set up her own agency instead and Beth Model Management Africa was born. Over the years, Isiorho has grown the brand from only 10 models to over 200 with 48 of them placed worldwide across various agencies, making Beth one of the largest modelling agencies in Africa.



Not one to give up, she used grit and tenacity to pioneer the model management model in Africa. 



“When I started, I thought it would be easy but the Nigerian market was very difficult. I am talking about 2004 when parents are thinking a certain way and parents don’t want their kids to model. I found a few faces and the issue I had was trying to convince the parents that it was not about prostitution. That was the negative stereotype because they felt they exposed their bodies etc.



“The other issue was trying to sign contracts with models when we find the right faces. People were scared to sign in Nigeria whereas in London, people were excited to sign with an agency,” says Isiorho.



Due to the lack of demand for African models at the time, Isiorho decided to start a model convention. Her thinking was simple. If the international fashion industry would not accept African models, she would bring them to Africa to see the untapped potential for themselves.



“So, I sent them emails and out of 11 agencies, nine of them replied to say they were coming and one of the agencies, which was Elite Models, said ‘we have a model search and would like you to be a part of it’.”



Founded in 1983, Elite Model Look is a prestigious international modeling contest credited with discovering supermodels such as Cindy Crawford, Gisele Bundchen, Lara Stone and Alessandra Ambrosia. This was the big break Isiorho needed for her agency. In 2007, she exclusively secured the rights to organize the Elite Model Look Nigeria/Africa contest.



“That was my biggest breakthrough because as an agency, for you to partner with one of the biggest modeling agencies in the world is a big deal and we worked together for 13 years. We discovered many stars like Mayowa Nicholas, Davidson Obennebo, Chika Emmanuella, Victor Ndigwe, Tobi Momoh, who are all on global campaigns,” says Isiorho.



Over the years, Isiorho has placed indigenous African beauty in global campaigns such as Victoria’s Secret and New York Fashion Week to name a few.



Her resilience has not gone unnoticed amongst her peers. “I have worked with Beth Models since the company’s inception and I’m filled with pride. The investment Elizabeth has made in the modeling industry across Africa is beyond glamorizing fashion; it’s the wider role the agency plays in changing stereotypes about working with Africans, giving African creatives a voice and ensuring African youth are empowered socio-economically,” says Omoyemi Akerele, the founder of Lagos Fashion Week.



Isiorho’s relationship with Elite continues to flourish even as she charts her own path. 



“Beth Models is a trusted collaborator of Elite Model Management, having organized Elite Model Look contest in Nigeria for over 10 years… In recent years, Beth Models expanded the search to Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda and used their experienced scouting skills to find fresh new talent with the potential for international modeling careers,” says Vick Mihaci, 



President, Elite Management Worldwide. With the cross-over of Africa’s rich talent repository, through incoming interest as well as the efforts of cultural emissaries such as Isiorho, it’s not long before the continent becomes the true face of the future.

The Model Entrepreneur Who Is Getting More African Faces On the Global Stage

Tom Bennett, Director and Founder of researchEd in the United Kingdom, on what evidence tells us about the future and purpose of education.



BY JILL DE VILLIERS



AS COVID-19 SWEPT THROUGH THE WORLD, SOME AREAS OF OUR lives were more deeply affected than others, one of them being education. Before the pandemic, technology had started taking a more prominent place in education, and online learning was being integrated into the system. 



When Covid-19 struck, schools and tertiary institutions were forced to change their models rapidly, migrating to digital options. Soon, the talk pivoted to blended learning and hybrid solutions, combining in-person and virtual classrooms and teaching methods. How likely are we to return to old teaching methods and classroom settings, we ask educationist, author and speaker Tom Bennett, who hails from the United Kingdom (UK) and is the Director and Founder of researchED. 



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:34% auto"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="768" height="1024" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Tom-Bennett_1-768x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-51596 size-full" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Tom-Bennett_1-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Tom-Bennett_1-225x300.jpg 225w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Tom-Bennett_1-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Tom-Bennett_1-1536x2048.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Tom-Bennett_1-scaled.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">Tom Bennett will deliver a talk during the 2021 Future of Education Virtual Summit, with the theme ‘Redefining the Purpose of Education’ on July 29, held in partnership with FORBES AFRICA and CNBC Africa</blockquote>
</div></div>



“After Covid, I see education 95% snapping back to where it was before, because the face-toface model of education simply cannot be beaten in most circumstances. The one benefit of the Covid experience has been that people the world over have seen how hard it is to home school children, how much blended learning often lacks compared to face-to-face… but also we have learned remote learning is not something impossible to manage and that where it is useful, we have lost our fear of trying it. For example, in the UK, whenever it snows, schools often shut and nothing gets done. But now, no more snow days, although I’m not sure that children and staff are as happy about that!” Bennett says. 



He was a teacher in the East End of London for 13 years before founding researchED, which he describes as “an international non-profit that asks simple questions that can change the world”. The organization brings together everyone within the educational ecosystem – “not just the privileged priest class of education, but teaching assistants, administrators, teachers, as well as academics, leaders and researchers – to share their thoughts about what they do, and what evidence informs what they do.” 



They travel the world, presenting low-cost, inclusive and accessible events, which are particularly popular among teaching staff, who are hungry for answers to questions like: ‘How can I achieve what I want, without struggling blindly in the dark? What does the evidence tell me? When do things work, and when do they not work?’ 



Bennett has written four books on classroom behavior and evidence-informed education. “Ideas about how we manage behavior are still stuck in the 19th century, and too many teachers and schools are forced to reinvent the wheel every generation instead of building upon what we have found to work and improving upon it,” he explains. 



“Teachers rarely get an evidence-informed training as they begin their careers, and many schools still make decisions based on intuition, gut feeling and hunches. But children – and teachers – deserve much better than that. We can do much better than that.” 



Lately, we have seen a burgeoning of technology solutions to a myriad of questions that Bennett says teachers aren’t asking. 



“Tech companies are often guilty of selling solutions to problems no one has, and ignoring the lack of evidence to back up the boldest of their claims. That’s not to say that tech doesn’t offer enormous opportunities to supplement and support education, but also to say that schools and countries have poured billions into tech promises that have rarely materialized.



“Evidence tells us many things that teachers can incorporate into their classrooms with only a little effort and with huge dividends: low-stakes retrieval practise (frequent testing) secures lesson retention enormously; being aware of cognitive load theory teaches us the students need information presented in manageable chunks, and that teachers should favour direct instruction with novice learners before allowing them too much freedom to drive their own studies. 



This is especially relevant with blended forms of learning, where beginning learners often drown in what they don’t know, and might lack the motivation and the foundational knowledge how to drive their own learning at home.” And finally, how does Bennett see the purpose of education? 



“The beauty of education is it has no intrinsic purpose. We have purposes for education. So when we ask ‘How should we educate?’ Then we have to first ask, ‘What do we think the aim of this education is for?’ Only once we have answered that can we rationally begin to decide what we need to do, whether we’re trying to teach the best of what has been thought and said, prepare citizens for the future, or help children become fully rounded human beings.&#8221;

Focus on raised hands in classroom

Education: What We Can Do Better

Microsoft&#8217;s move to add the role of board chairman to CEO Satya Nadella&#8217;s duties at the technology giant bucks a growing trend of companies separating the two jobs.



The number of companies whose CEO also held the title of chairman has declined steadily over the past three years at U.S. companies of all sizes, from the megacap corporations in the S&amp;P 500 to the smaller firms in the Russell 3000 index, according to new research by the Conference Board and analytics firm ESGAUGE.



The trend seems to be more pronounced among smaller companies. Only 36% of Russell 3000 companies had the CEO also serve as chair in 2020. That&#8217;s down from 41% percent in 2016.



“The importance of having an independent board has pushed many organizations to adopt a separation model,” says Matteo Tonello from The Conference Board. “The strong leadership skill sets in CEOs of very large S&amp;P 500 companies may be the reason why these companies are more reluctant to have the role separation,” he added.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



Providing better oversight of company management and avoiding the sorts of conflicts of interest that sunk companies like WorldCom and Tyco, have largely been the reasons behind the role separations.



In companies that give CEOs a chair role as a reward for proving themselves as leaders, the gap is typically closer to two years. Nadella’s predecessor, Steve Ballmer, never named chairman during his 14-year tenure as CEO of the software giant. For years, co-founder Bill Gates played that role. John Thompson became chairman when Nadella was named CEO in February 2014 and will return to his previous role of being lead independent director.&nbsp;



&nbsp;Microsoft rationalized Nadella&#8217;s promotion in a statement that suggested the board wanted a firmer focus on management priorities. “In this role, Nadella will lead the work to set the agenda for the board, leveraging his deep understanding of the business to elevate the right strategic opportunities and identify key risks and mitigation approaches for the board’s review,” said the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/microsoft-board-of-directors-announces-role-changes-and-quarterly-dividend-301314220.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">statement.&nbsp;</a>



&nbsp;The spotlight on the trend of CEOs serving as board chairs became more intense after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. Along with sinking many Internet startups, the stock crash made investors more skeptical about the cult of personality around many company leaders. Scandals at companies like Tyco, Enron, and WorldCom only reinforced a key question: Where was the board?&nbsp; Separating the chairman and CEO role was seen as a critical step in reinforcing board independence.



The debate continued, intensifying again after the 2008 financial crisis. In February 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued rules requiring listed companies to disclose their leadership structure and explain why it was appropriate. That exercise, along with pressure from shareholders, proxy advisory firms, and regulators, has prompted a slow but steady trend towards separating the chair and CEO roles. As Peter Crist, chairman of search firm Crist | Kolder, notes, “once those roles are decoupled, it’s rare to go back.”



The exception is when a successful CEO wants that role — or it’s treated as a promotion for a job well done. Mary Barra at General Motors, for example, followed a fairly typical pattern in being named chair of GM two years after holding the CEO slot. What’s unusual about Satya Nadella is the fact that he was CEO for seven years before being named chairman. That could indicate some frustration or perceived issues with the board’s ability to navigate through the current environment.&nbsp;



“The chair has more power to control the agenda and set the stage for conversations in the boardroom,” says Crist. “A CEO may say, ‘I need to lead and educate the board’ to get things done.”&nbsp;



That said, Crist rarely supports such a move. “I’m a strong believer in separating the chair and CEO roles … Not many board members can stand up to a strong CEO. Look at compensation trends. When is  compensation going to trend down? Never. It’s important to have as much autonomy as possible … If you’re a high-performing company and the CEO is viewed as a critical element of success, investors will basically shrug their shoulders when a CEO gets named chair of the board.”



By Aayushi Pratap, Forbes Staff

Microsoft Holds Annual Shareholder Meeting

Nadella’s Appointment As Microsoft Chair Bucks Governance Trend

East African techpreneur Neema Iyer works at the intersection of data, design and digital to eventually enable products, policies and programs that take into account the needs of African women.



ARE GENDER DIFFERENCES AS RIFE on the world wide web as in the real world? When technologist Neema Iyer returned home to Africa after graduating from Emory University in the United States with a degree in epidemiology and statistics, she was bent on addressing gender from a technology perspective. 



Born to Tanzanian and Indian parents and raised in Nigeria, 34-year-old Iyer is today running Pollicy, a firm she founded in Kampala, Uganda, as a civic technology organization that works at the intersection of data design and technology and understanding how data can be used most effectively for improving service delivery through research, digital literacy, digital security and products. 



When she first touched down, she took up a job in Uganda where she worked in the ICT sector, but under predominantly white, male founders from the West. There was also a lack of touch points in governments with the African context. So Iyer decided she needed a fresh perspective using a gender lens.



“When you really look at it like a lot of technology, a lot of data, the systems are developed in Silicon Valley and I don’t feel that African women are particularly the end users when they design different technology,” says Iyer. 



Pollicy, funded mostly by grants from big tech like Facebook and Mozilla, more broadly focuses on gendered data and feminist data, that takes into account power dynamics and the person researching. 



“If you don’t have this kind of data, then it would be very difficult to make platforms or policies of programs that really take into account the needs of African women and what are the challenges and what are the gaps,” she says. 



For instance, field research or product development would usually involve talking to the head of the household or people in authority, which would usually be men. There are many other situations where women may not be allowed to take part in research, and Iyer thinks challenging this status quo is more important now more than ever. 



“Women in Africa are least likely to be connected to the internet, so there’s a very big digital gender gap. And they tend to have lower digital literacy, they tend to have lower ownership of mobile devices, they tend to have lower access to information. So, when you take all of these things into account, you can’t just have a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone.” Iyer notes cultural differences in even who can answer a phone call or who can own a phone. 



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignleft size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Afrofeminist-Data-Futures-7-914x1024.png" alt="" class="wp-image-51400" width="315" height="353" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Afrofeminist-Data-Futures-7-914x1024.png 914w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Afrofeminist-Data-Futures-7-268x300.png 268w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Afrofeminist-Data-Futures-7-768x860.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Afrofeminist-Data-Futures-7-1371x1536.png 1371w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Afrofeminist-Data-Futures-7-1829x2048.png 1829w" sizes="(max-width: 315px) 100vw, 315px" /></figure></div>



These restrict women’s voices and participation. And even those can be online, as substantiated by online violence and gender disinformation. “It basically leads to the censorship of women, it leads to them leaving online spaces…if you don’t really think about these issues from the gender nuance, then you can replicate a lot of the discrimination that already exists in the physical world.” 



For her, these aspects need attention to meet the different needs of people, and to build products accordingly. Iyer is also interested in combining art and data. 



“So, moving beyond just spreadsheets and trying to make data more accessible to people.” 



For example, her team worked on a project in Uganda called ‘Create Your Kampala’, where they collected data from local communities on different social services, and then worked with them to create wall murals as a way to share back their data and get people involved in the conversation. 



“[We wanted to say] ‘you own this data; this is your data; how are you going to use it to improve your situation’?” 



But the challenge is that a number of African countries are not moving as quickly as they should in using, supporting and protecting data. Data collection is expensive, there are many administrative hurdles, and it needs a lot of trustbuilding. Pollicy is about four years old and Iyer had hoped it would have made more headway in this time, thinking there would have been be so many competitors in the space by now. 



“When I look back, I don’t feel like so much has changed, like we’re still very much lagging in the conversations. A lot of the artificial intelligence conversations are dominated way more by other countries, and even though funders are trying to do more in the African context, there is just not enough happening. So, I would love to see more organizations coming out and doing much, much more work on everything from collecting data, to analyzing it, to processing it, to getting value from it… with a feminist lens.” 



Iyer asserts that data will really help drive innovation and improve services, because if people know where the gaps are, then they can improve business, creativity and products. There is, of course, the fear that governments could use these systems to oppress dissenting voices. 



“Everything we do is grounded in ethics and equity and inclusiveness, so that when you do build technology, it’s not used to harm marginalized people… we need to come together now to think about that and to come up with solutions… I feel like there’s this urgency that we need to come up with better laws that work for everyone.”



Another challenge Iyer notes is the need to make data as intersectional as possible. 



“You don’t want power to be concentrated… so really thinking about power dynamics when you use data, I think it’s that intersectionality of gender and class and tribe and ethnicity, so that you can really make equitable products from the data.” 



Iyer also hopes to expand beyond Africa’s borders and continue working with government and civil society to create a better world. “You know, crafting our futures together in a way that works for everyone; that’s equitable and that’s inclusive and we want to make our own decisions for ourselves; so I really want to push that narrative.”



BY INAARA GANGJI

Ninnojackjr 2

Driving Feminist Data For Change

Temitope Mayegun has made a name in Nigeria selling natural oils from fruits, seeds and vegetables, but it was a greasy path to follow.



From stock trading to skincare, in the last four years, Temitope Mayegun has built a company that sells what she calls “natural skincare products” but to achieve that, she first needed to change the mindset of Nigerians.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“I got divine inspiration,” she says, “to start a company that will enrich lives and inspire a healthier and happier world.” The founder and CEO of Avila Naturalle in Nigeria felt she needed to first educate people about the toxic and unsafe chemicals they were hitherto using for bleaching and skin whitening, considering how sought-after they are in Nigeria.



The former stock broker was also frustrated she couldn’t find an all-natural skin product without bleaching or whitening ingredients harmful to the skin, so she created her own.



Today, from a humble start in 2017, her company retails over 350 products in the skincare division, 90 products in the food division and 10 products in the water and drinks division.



But it took a lot of ground work and research to start with.



“I saw that many people believe your skincare product should enhance or change your skin color,” recalls Mayegun.



With a degree in accounting from the University of Lagos as well as an International Masters in Business Administration from Eaton Business School; and having done a Harvard Business School Executive Leadership course, Mayegun’s most valuable qualification would prove to be a diploma she obtained in an organic and natural skin school in London.



Equipped with the knowledge of the goodness of natural products, Mayegun set out on the cumbersome path of changing perceptions.



“It was difficult because a lot of people were not ready to change their bleaching and whitening products. So, we did not follow the crowd even though there was pressure to go into whitening and pressure to create products that will let customers bleach their skin,” says Mayegun.



To combat stereotypes, Mayegun knew she had to create a unique product. She began with 30,000 units of pure coconut oil.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“I had to create campaigns to educate the public on the importance of using natural products.”</blockquote>



“At the time, there was no pure coconut oil on the market. Most of them were watered down with other edible oils which reduces the quality. I had to create campaigns to educate the public on the importance of using natural products and sell them on the superior quality of our products.”



The hard work paid off and Mayegun sold out her 30,000 units, which was two cartons of pure coconut oil, in just two days. It was time to expand her business and with that, she needed to find capital.



“I started asking friends for a loan but I could not raise the money. I went to microfinance companies looking for a $10,000-loan and they said I needed collateral which I didn’t have.



“There were times when I worked between 17 and 21 hours a day. I would be trying to convince people on why they should use coconut oil for their skin. I knew people were not ready for natural products but I kept pushing and after a while, I got a lot of people asking for coconut oil and it was not easy meeting the demand,” says Mayegun.



Soon, word got out and the distributors came calling. Today, Avila Naturalle offers multiple natural essential oils made from carrots, avocado, hibiscus and mustard.



“When people saw our mustard oil, they were shocked that there were these oils in Nigeria. So, they bought in bulk to resell. We were the first to produce essential oils in Nigeria. People were asking if we bought them from abroad and dilute it with other products which was the norm. We are the only company that sells 100% pure natural oils from fruits and seeds.”



The sizeable beauty and personal care market in Nigeria is what Mayegun has sets her sights on.



“To make this happen we have created a multi-channel natural body care and household brand with multiple product lines, which combines a dynamic distribution network with a retail strategy as well as e-commerce,” she says, also referring to changing consumer habits in the post-Covid world.



With just $100 and a burgeoning global supply chain network, Mayegun has built a million-dollar company manufacturing natural body and hair care products and foods in Africa.

temitope mayegun

The Natural Route To Business Success

Insect farming is providing the planet a cheaper alternative source of protein. And South African startups bringing it to the mainstream say there’s no business like the bug business. Could the future of food be insect-protein?



An insect in your meal? What was once food faux pas is now a deliberate culinary concoction.



Insect-based proteins are slowly finding their way into agricultural production lines and the menus of discerning diners. It’s a growing industry also looking to primarily help meet the demands of an increasing population, with several startups now pioneering this sector in Africa.



But nutritional bugs are not new to palates across the world; it’s just the way they are being given new meaning that’s gaining currency in the continent&#8217;s farming communities. “Eating insects is nothing new, but the key is to provide a functional equivalent to animal protein that is more sustainable,” says Dr Leah Bessa, co-founder of South African company Gourmet Grubb, which produces a dairy alternative from insect-proteins.



“We found that people were quite willing to try our product. While there is still a mental barrier (to insect-proteins), the market will change quite quickly – it took a long time for plant-based alternative proteins to become accepted, but now they are commonly available.” Gourmet Grubb has positioned itself at the intersection of novelty and environmental sustainability. Based in Cape Town, it farms insects from spent grain. The environmental costs to such farming are considerably lower than animal farming, a major contributor to pollution and land use globally. “South African palates can be quite conservative, but it’s a matter of availability and exposure before tastes change,” continues Bessa.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“We found that people were quite willing to try our product. While there is still a mental barrier (to insect-proteins), the market will change quite quickly – it took a long time for plant-based alternative proteins to become accepted, but now they are commonly available.”</blockquote>



In South Africa, mopane worms (a species of emperor moth) fall under the category of edible insect-proteins that most people are familiar with. Once a regional staple in the Limpopo province of South Africa, household consumption of it has been on the decline as people move to more Western diets, despite increased interest in the Western world in new forms of protein – so says Dr Bronwyn Egan, a pioneer in insect-protein research at the Larry Leach Herbarium, University of Limpopo.



“Most people consuming insects currently do so as a form of subsistence protein – because it’s cheap and well, free.” According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization in 2013, globally, some two billion people in 130 countries consume insects as a source of protein already, but with population numbers expected to boom to 10 billion by 2050 and global food production expected to grow as much as 70% to meet the new demand, novel and effective food sources are needed. Cost to consumers can play an equal if not greater impact than sentiment, with insect protein being comparable in terms of nutrition to most animal proteins, but considerably cheaper per gram. However, with an increase in consumption and the formalization of insect-protein farming come other challenges.



“The industry needs a baseline nutritional analysis to provide more information as to the benefits of different insect-based proteins, as well as more investigation into the ecology of the insects themselves,” says Egan.



“Once products are out in the market, there is also a need to comply with food safety legislation, and ensure that sustainability and the environment are a key part of production – ideally, before the marketing of insect-protein products, but it seems these will have to happen together.”&nbsp; Innovative companies such as Gourmet Grubb, Ensekta and Kenya’s InsectiPro are expected to make a break into the mainstream, with the estimates of the global insect-protein market at around $8 billion by 2030 (according to Meticulous Research last year), paving the way for new opportunities for growth and investment on the African continent. “Grasshoppers are the tastiest,” laughs Egan, in conclusion.



– By Yeshiel Panchia

Insect Protein 3

Bugs In Your Food? Yes Please, And Spicy!

The Bezos of Black Wall Street: A century ago, O.W. Gurley built an empire of African American businesses in Tulsa. Though it all came burning down in the massacre of 1921, new generations of entrepreneurs rose from the ashes.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/GettyImages-1318520952-1024x669.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-51188" width="710" height="463" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/GettyImages-1318520952-1024x669.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/GettyImages-1318520952-300x196.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/GettyImages-1318520952-768x502.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/GettyImages-1318520952-1536x1004.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/GettyImages-1318520952-2048x1339.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 710px) 100vw, 710px" /><figcaption> (Photo by Greenwood Cultural Center/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure></div>



Ottowa W. Gurley knew he would never be a success in the Jim Crow South. Born on Christmas Day 1868 to freed slaves in Huntsville, Alabama, he grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas where he was largely self-educated. Gurley married his childhood sweetheart, Emma, became a teacher, and then took a relatively cushy job with the U.S. Postal Service—but he dreamed of a better life in America. Along with his new bride, Gurley risked everything to join a stampede of homesteaders seeking freedom, opportunity and wealth in the Great Oklahoma Land Rush.



On September 16, 1893, the 25-year-old entrepreneur joined the Cherokee Outlet Opening, running fifty miles before finally stopping at a plot of prairie grass. Standing on a plot of land with Emma, he staked a claim in what would soon become Perry, Oklahoma, one of many towns advertised to Blacks in the new territory.



Gurley envisioned Oklahoma as the start of a new life for Black Americans decades after emancipation—and he was ambitious. He ran for county treasurer, was  made principal at the town’s school, and ultimately opened a successful general store, which he ran for a decade. By the turn of the century, Gurley and his  fellow  homesteaders heard tales of giant oil fields in the nearby boomtown of Tulsa. A gusher well called the Ida Glenn Number 1, the first find in the massive Mid-Continent Oil Field, was making local Tulsans rich—and eventually turned no-name wildcatters Harry Ford Sinclair and J. Paul Getty into oil barons.



O.W. Gurley wanted in.



He sold his store and land in Perry and moved about 80 miles to Tulsa in 1905,  taking the second major risk of his young life. He bought a large tract of land on the north side of the Frisco train tracks. On a barren plot, he started to map out a city for upwardly mobile Blacks, who, much like himself, were looking for opportunity. After emancipation, Blacks who had followed the Native American “Trail of Tears” as slaves, could now claim land. They migrated westward, through Kansas in the 1870s and 1880s, and then blazed Gurley’s path through the Oklahoma territory in the 1890s. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“The significant thing about Greenwood is it was not just a Black thing” says James O. Goodwin. “It was quintessential America.”</blockquote>



Gurley knew freemen and sharecroppers would make their way to Tulsa, so he built a grocery store on an avenue he and others named Greenwood, after a town in Mississippi. Then he subdivided his land into residential and commercial lots. As Gurley expected, Greenwood soon became a beacon of wealth, education and advancement—rivaling areas of New York, Chicago and Atlanta. Doctors, lawyers and realtors flourished, luxury hotels were built, and millionaires were minted. And because all of those businesses were Black-owned, Booker T. Washington himself dubbed  Greenwood “Negro Wall Street.”



“Greenwood was perceived as a place to escape oppression—economic, social, political oppression—in the Deep South,” says Hannibal B. Johnson, a Tulsa-based historian who has written numerous books about Greenwood, including Black Wall Street. “It was an economy born of necessity. It wouldn’t have existed had it not been for Jim Crow segregation and the inability of Black folks to participate to a substantial degree in the larger white-dominated economy.” 



In the first two decades of the 20th century, Tulsa transformed from a dusty frontier into a thriving metropolis. Gusher after gusher was discovered and the city soon became the oil capital of the world—and Gurley’s Greenwood began to boom with it. Between 1910 and 1920, Tulsa’s population nearly quadrupled to more than 72,000 and the Black population rose from below 2,000 to almost 9,000.



By 1920, a walk through “Black Wall Street” meant traversing more than 35 bustling city blocks, with the locus being the intersection of Greenwood Avenue and Archer  Street, adjacent to Tulsa’s Frisco rail tracks. The Acme Brick Company supplied building materials to the townhouses, apartments, theaters, and hotels that lined the streets. And by 1910, Black bricklayers had their own trade union called the Hod Carriers Local 199. 



Entrepreneurs also began to emerge. John Williams and his wife, Loula, built a confectionary store and erected the opulent Dreamland Theater. Simon Berry built a private transportation network of Model T. Fords and buses, which transported residents through Greenwood and all the way to downtown Tulsa. Berry soon began chartering planes for Tulsa’s increasingly wealthy oilmen.



Though the population was relatively small, Greenwood also had two newspapers, including the Tulsa Star, founded by A.J. Smitherman. Others built pool halls, auto repair shops, beauty parlors, grocers, barber shops, and funeral homes. There was a Y.M.C.A and a roller skating rink, a hospital, and a U.S. post office substation. With all this activity, Greenwood’s economy was gushing like one of Getty’s wells. It was calculated that every dollar spent in Greenwood circulated the Black economy nearly thirty times as business thrived. 



Along with this massive prosperity, the community invested in houses of worship and schools. By 1920, Greenwood had a handful of churches, most notable by the impressive Mt. Zion Baptist Church built in 1909. The district had its own elite high school, named after Booker T. Washington, which boasted a curriculum that would prepare students to eventually study at colleges like Columbia in New York, Oberlin in Ohio, and historically Black colleges such as Hampton, Tuskegee, and Spelman.



Freshman studied algebra, Latin and ancient history, as well as core subjects like  English, science, art and music.  Sophomores took economics and geometry, while juniors advanced to chemistry and trade-oriented subjects such as civics and business-spelling. Seniors studied physics and trigonometry, as well as vocal music, art and bookkeeping. So important was education in upwardly mobile Greenwood that teachers were among the highest paid workers. Many had their own Steinway pianos in their apartments, while the school’s principal, E.W. Woods, lived in a six-room townhouse.



Amid this bustling landscape, O.W. Gurley continued to expand his empire. At Greenwood’s peak, he owned and rented out three brick apartment buildings and five townhouses near another one of his businesses, a grocery store. He then built the Gurley Hotel, started a Masonic Lodge, and opened an employment agency for migrant workers. As Greenwood’s premier entrepreneur, Gurley built ties with residents in white Tulsa, just across the Frisco tracks, and was eventually made sheriff’s deputy, charged with policing the Black population. All told, Gurley’s portfolio was estimated to be worth more than $150,000 at the time, or nearly $5 million today.



And he wasn’t the only entrepreneur to tower over Greenwood. J.B. Stradford was born in 1861, to a freed slave named J.C. Stradford, who had been emancipated in Stratford, Ontario. After settling in the South, J.C. (for Julius Caesar) named his son J.B. (for John the Baptist). The younger Stradford immediately began fulfilling his father’s dream. He graduated from Oberlin and Indiana Law School, then moved to St. Louis and Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, where he opened pool halls, shoeshine  parlors, bathhouses and boarding houses. After one of his hotels went bust, Stradford moved to Tulsa in 1899 and began planning the creation of a Black community on the outskirts of town.



When Gurley arrived in 1906, the two worked in tandem building up Greenwood. Like Gurley, Stradford focused on real estate, building rentals units. The crown jewel of his portfolio was the Stradford Hotel on 301 N. Greenwood, at the time, the largest Black-owned hotel in America with 54 suites, a gambling hall, dining room, saloon and a pool hall. Stradford had built his hotel to be equal in luxury to the finest lodgings in the white Tulsa, and it stood as the big monument to Greenwood’s rising success, valued at $75,000 (or about $2.5 million today). 



“The significant thing about Greenwood is it was not just a Black thing. It was quintessential America,” says James O. Goodwin, owner of weekly newspaper The Oklahoma Eagle, which traces its roots to Greenwood’s Tulsa Star, where his grandfather worked. Goodwin was born in Tulsa in 1939, the son of a Black Wall Street resident. “It was like any other developing neighborhood, whether that’s Irish, or Greek, or Jewish,” he explains. “These people embraced faith, they believed in education and hard work. They believed in capitalism and freedom.”



“People should look at Greenwood as a part of Americana, and not some aberration or a freak of nature,” he adds. 



Even the first World War couldn’t derail Greenwood’s prosperity, but the disparity and tension between White and Black America was prevalent. After hundreds of thousands of Black veterans returned to Jim Crow and segregation, there was “Red Summer” in 1919, a period of white supremacist terror that dovetailed with vestigial communist fears from the 1917 Russian Revolution. Lynchings and race riots occurred across the country and the dormant Ku Klux Klan reemerged. Tulsa did not escape the racial tensions. When Oklahoma was granted statehood in 1907, the first acts of the legislature were to institute segregation. Smitherman, the publisher of the Tulsa Star, began to document lynchings across Oklahoma, in towns such as Dewey, Muskogee and Bristow.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“Greenwood shows that when we are left to our own devices and don’t have a knee to our neck, we can achieve extraordinary things,” says John W. Rogers Jr.</blockquote>



The violence finally exploded in Tulsa on May 30, 1921, when a Black shoeshine man named Dick Rowland was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman, Sarah Page, in the elevator of a downtown office building. The next day, the story was prominently featured in the white Tulsa Tribune, inflaming locals. A large mob formed around the jail in Tulsa where Rowland was being held and as rumors of a potential lynching circulated through Greenwood, a group of armed men marched to the jail to protect him. Tensions flared and local power brokers, including O.W. Gurley, tried but failed to make peace. According to witnesses, there was a scuffle between a white man and a Black man, a shot was fired, and a little after 10 p.m. a riot had broken out.



By the early morning of June 1, an armed white mob had already started burning Greenwood to the ground.



At 5 a.m. the mob began a full-bore assault on Black Wall Street. Some eyewitnesses in accounts from the 2001 Commission to study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, reported that kerosene bombs were dropped from airplanes to demolish buildings, and when the assault was over, as many as 50 whites and 200 Blacks were dead, and more than 35 square blocks had been destroyed. Those who survived the riot were rounded up by the National Guard and put in internment centers for many weeks and months. Greenwood’s total property loss neared $2 million (over $50 million now), according to some estimates, and Gurley and Stradford both lost the bulk of their fortunes as their hotels and townhouses were burned. 



Most of the bodies were never recovered, presumed to have been buried in a mass grave that has still never been located. And no one was ever prosecuted or punished for the biggest racial massacre in American history.



“Greenwood shows that when we are left to our own devices and don’t have a knee to our neck, we can achieve extraordinary things,” says John W. Rogers Jr., the chairman of Ariel Investments and great-grandson of J.B. Stradford, ‘Tulsa proves that African American can build great businesses and be extraordinary successful.”



“On the other hand,” Rogers adds, “It shows you that unfortunately so many times in our history, when Black folks get a few steps ahead, we get pulled back down… It’s why the wealth gap in this country is so dramatically worse than it was 25 or 40 years ago.”



For Black Wall Street’s principal&nbsp;architects,&nbsp;O.W. Gurley and J.B. Stradford, the 1921 Tulsa riots yielded decidedly different fates. Gurley and his wife, Emma, were eventually released from the National Guard’s internment camp, while Stradford fled Greenwood, along with other residents like the Tulsa Star publisher A.J. Smitherman. Eventually, Tulsa’s police tried to blame both Stradford and Smitherman as agitators of the riot. Both had become known for challenging the uglier facets of white authority—like segregation and lynchings—and were indicted among dozens of Greenwood citizens. Gurley became a witness in the prosecutor’s grand jury case, testifying that Stradford and Smitherman had given orders to angry Blacks congregating and looking to defend Rowland from his lynching. A few whites Tulsans were indicted, but none were ever convicted.&nbsp;



With nothing left of Black Wall Street, Gurley left Greenwood for Los Angeles, where he died in 1935, with little indication of wealth. Stradford headed to Independence, Kansas, and then to Chicago. Though his hotel and wealth were lost in the destruction of Greenwood, his enterprising spirit passed down generations.&nbsp;



“My mom would often talk about how her grandfather had owned this extraordinarily successful hotel that was firebombed and destroyed during the Tulsa race riots,” says John W. Rogers Jr. “It inspired her to become a lawyer because she saw her father use legal skills to stop her grandfather’s extradition back to Tulsa. He would have been lynched if he came back. It had a profound impact on my mom.”&nbsp;



Rogers’ mother, Jewel, was the first Black woman to graduate the University of Chicago Law School. In 1955, President Eisenhower appointed her as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and in the 1960s. She became the first black woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, and eventually became an influential figure in Corporate America and national politics.



Rogers graduated from Princeton University in 1980 and founded the first Black-owned mutual fund company in 1983. “J.B. Stradford was a leader among leaders in Tulsa… He wasn’t one to kowtow,” Rogers says of his great-grandfather. “Building a business and being willing to challenge authority… and fight for economic fairness, it’s something that was passed down generation-to-generation.” His $10 billion in assets Ariel Investments, known for its value-oriented style, is a trailblazer among a handful of thriving firms on the new Black Wall Street.



Billionaire Robert F. Smith’s $57 billion Vista Equity Partners towers over the private equity industry for its stellar returns. The same industry leadership can be seen at Baltimore’s $13 billion in assets Brown Capital Management, a Black-owned firm known for uncovering small, unheralded companies such as Tyler Technologies that eventually grow into S&amp;P 500 Index titans.



Though Rogers and his family stand as an emblem for economic gains that connect directly to Greenwood and Black Wall Street, the 1921 riots exemplify America’s deep and systemic economic inequities. The value plowed into Black Wall Street and lost—about $50 million in present day dollars—barely scratches the surface of the opportunities denied and dreams deferred.



As Rogers explains, that Greenwood money never got a chance compound. Families didn’t take their accrued wealth and reinvest it, diversify, or expand. He points to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which shows that between 1992 and 2013, the net worth of Black people who graduated from four-year colleges dropped 55%, while white wealth rose 90%. The staggering statistic reveals decades of lost capital compounded.



“The effects of us not having multi-generational wealth and not having economic opportunity continues in our society today,” says Rogers, who supports reparations for descendants of Black Wall Street. In 2003’s Alexander v. The State of Oklahoma, hundreds of plaintiffs tracing their roots to Greenwood sued the state for $20 million in reparations, but the case was dismissed.



“All of this comes down to wealth. Wealth creates opportunity to have a better education and to live in a better neighborhood,” says Rogers, who cites Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, “Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice but tolerated or ignored economic injustice.”



“King’s words are just as valuable today,” Rogers says. “It’s why the story of Greenwood is so important.”



By Antoine Gara, Forbes Staff

TOPSHOT-US-VOTE-DEMONSTRATION-RACISM

The Epic Rise Of Black Wall Street And The Entrepreneurs Who Built It

With the social scene slowly crawling back to some semblance of normalcy, entrepreneur Bukky George-Taylor is cashing in with an app for customers keen on curated events and experiences in Nigeria.



If there is one person who knows what is hot and trendy in Africa’s biggest economy and most populous country, it is Bukky George-Taylor.



As the CEO and Founder of Robert Taylor Media Ltd., a boutique communications and events company based in Lagos, Nigeria, she is the force behind some of the biggest brand activations and campaigns in the country as well as providing representation for global brands looking to penetrate the African market. 



And her latest creation, a mobile app named CRAWL Africa, launched in Lagos in March, seems to address the need to adapt to a new social life in ‘a new normal’. She calls it Africa’s first social calendar app on a mission to revolutionize social experiences in Africa by presenting a collection of curated experiences for the discerning and upwardly-mobile African consumer.



“Finding information on where to go or contacting establishments in Nigeria and across Africa can be a chore. With no access to 411 or yellow pages in Africa, CRAWL provides you with all the accurate contact information to contact businesses and to tour your city,” says George-Taylor about the new app, which currently has over 100 businesses listed.



With a degree in African-American history from the University of Massachusetts in the United States, George-Taylor has built a firm that services the corporate, entertainment, lifestyle, fashion, beauty and health sectors. This has always ensured her access to the hottest events and happenings in Nigeria.



But why choose to launch an app when the retail and hospitality sector is still recovering from the effects of a raging pandemic?



“The app launched because our city [Lagos] started to open back up with restaurants and smaller events. One of the major reasons was because of travel restrictions; the app was birthed to promote tourism and encourage people to start exploring their own cities.



“The app also enables CRAWLers to save their favorite locations or experiences for future references with a single tap while making suggestions to users based on the preferences they select,&nbsp;such as budget, location, and more.”&nbsp;



As Nigeria’s social scene gradually reopens, the events listings will be reflected on the app. George-Taylor is now also looking at other cities in sub-Saharan Africa such as Accra, Kigali, Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg and Cape Town in which to launch CRAWL Africa.

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Want To Party In The New Normal? This Could Be How

Ivorian entrepreneur Charlette N&#8217;Guessan is on a mission to solve a $400 million problem faced by Ghanaian financial institutions.



The BACE Group, co-founded by Charlette N’Guessan, is on a mission to solve a $400 million problem faced by Ghanaian financial institutions to identify customers. Their solution – the BACE API, a software that uses facial recognition to help banks streamline their Know Your Customer (KYC) process.



N’Guessan, who is also CEO of the Ghana-based software company, stumbled upon the idea when she relocated from her native Ivory Coast to Ghana to take part in the one-year MEST entrepreneur training program. MEST, which is an Africa-wide technology entrepreneur training program, was founded in Ghana in 2008 and provides funding as well as skills training to Africa’s brightest software developers.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“We started talking to banks and fintech companies in Ghana and we noticed that they were spending a lot of money in terms of KYC and also things related to security.”</blockquote>



“When I first moved to Ghana, I could not speak English, so it was very difficult to communicate. But we had the ecosystem where we could learn English through MEST. That’s how I met my co-founder and we had a similar interest in terms of solving key challenges in Africa. We started to study the local market and what challenges they were facing and we started talking to banks and fintech companies in Ghana and we noticed that they were spending a lot of money in terms of KYC and also things related to security,” says N’Guessan.



With a strong background in electronic and computer science as well as software engineering, the 26-year-old set out to initially create an app before pivoting and launching an Application Program Interface (API) instead that could be integrated into any existing bank app or solution.



“Outside Africa a lot of people are trying to use facial recognition and there was some confusion about how it can work properly in Africa. But we are young and we want to do something challenging. We decided to use facial recognition instead of finger print because, for us, facial recognition was a lot simpler because it doesn’t require a lot of devices. If you go to your bank, you go to an agent and she will check your identity by looking at your face and your ID and know that it is you. She won’t check your fingerprints first. So, we wanted to bring this natural process into tech digitization and facial recognition was the technology that would be able to make this happen for us,” says N’Guessan.



The BACE API has been specifically developed for Africans by using nothing more than a device’s inbuilt camera and utilizes live images and short videos on those devices. The company has also teamed up with certified government-issued Identity documents that has granted the company access to Ghanaian passports to further expand its reach.



N’Guessan’s innovation is currently being utilized by two financial institutions in Ghana and has made her the first woman ever to win the Royal Academy of Engineering’s prestigious 2020 Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation.



“From 15 teams we were shortlisted to four teams who pitched to the jury and based on our track record, we won. We received £25,000 ($34,000) which we are investing into developing the product even further. It is good because the product is relevant for Covid-19 where a lot of people are no longer meeting physically.”



N’Guessan and the BACE Group are now targeting all African companies and different sectors where, she is hoping the technology will be used for remote onboarding of drivers in companies like UBER to telecom companies’ enrolment of simcards.

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The Techpreneur On The Money

Two African entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom. One tale of grit and gumption in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. 



IN 2019, WHEN BERNICIA BOATENG OPENED HER namesake makeup studio, Bernicia Boateng Studios, in London’s high street, it made her the first Ghanaian to do so. Her makeup business had grown considerably over the years, as she cultivated some big names as her clientele including, as she says, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and models Leomie Anderson and Jourdan Dunn.



She was beginning to be recognized for her work with features in publications such as Vogue and collaborations with beauty and fashion houses such as Estée Lauder and Yves Saint Laurent. When the BBC and Evening Standard were looking for a voice representing excellence in the makeup industry, Boateng was the go-to name. But then came the pandemic, the lockdowns, the second wave, and a twist in the fairy tale. 



“When I realized that face-to-face contact wasn’t something we can rely on anymore, I kind of moved the brand towards education,” says Boateng, on her decision to strategize to survive. But how did she end up in the beauty business in the United Kingdom (UK)? 



“I have always wanted to be a makeup artist because my mum loved makeup and it was something I always found desirable. I wanted to be just like my mum who was a very glamorous woman. I remember she would take us to Selfridges (high-end department store) on the weekends after drama school and she would make us sit down and watch as she got her makeup done and that is where I got interested,” says Boateng. 



Those were the days before YouTube and social media makeup tutorials when the only way one could hone the craft was by rolling up the sleeves and learning on the job or from a professional on the shop floor. And that is exactly what Boateng did. 



After graduating with a business management degree from the University of Leicester in the UK, Boateng got her first job with Mac Cosmetics as a makeup artist, before branching out to become her own professional. 



“2011 and 2012 [were the years] makeup took over and it was all over social media with videos on how to recreate makeup and I just realized that there was a gap in the market in terms of doing a luxury makeup look for dark-skinned girls and I wanted to fill that void,” she says of the early years. 



But now, in order to fill the void created by the pandemic, she has had to give her business an even bigger digital persona. 



“When it first hit, the first thing I thought of was taking my work online. A lot of people still want to look good at home and we don’t have a lot of control about where we can go or where we can eat but one thing we do have control over is how we look, how we make ourselves feel, and how we make other people feel. So, it was imperative to show people how to look and feel good,” says Boateng. 



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:26% auto"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="927" height="1024" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Boateng-927x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-50782 size-full" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Boateng-927x1024.jpg 927w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Boateng-272x300.jpg 272w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Boateng-768x848.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Boateng-1391x1536.jpg 1391w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Boateng.jpg 1476w" sizes="(max-width: 927px) 100vw, 927px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">We don’t have a lot of control about where we can go or where we can eat but one thing we do have control over is how we look. – Bernicia Boateng</blockquote>
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She began with online tutorials that did so well that they were covered by the BBC. She also began creating more content establishing a more personal rapport with her 115,000-strong Instagram audience, taking them on a journey to enhancing their self-esteem. The result of these initiatives means Boateng has now found a new revenue stream to stay afloat. 



But who knows for how long until the pandemic ebbs away? With the UK experiencing harsh restrictions, startups have all either had to fold up, pivot or start all over. 



Take for example, Brimms Bottles Limited, founded by P.Y. Adjei, which had to adapt almost immediately to the new economic climate. After graduating from the University of Greenwich, Adjei worked in the banking sector for about five years before listening to his inner entrepreneurial voice. 



He began by creating content for a number of magazines before launching his own publication, which he ran for a few years. With Brexit gaining momentum, Adjei had his eureka moment during a chance encounter with a friend that led him all the way to China in search of greener pastures. 



“My time there influenced what I am doing today because I got a chance to meet a number of manufacturers and from there, I came across what I thought was a brilliant product,” says Adjei. 



That product was a stainless-steel bottle that kept a drink warm for 12 hours or cold for a whole day. 



“It looked beautiful to me and the only thing missing was the product packaging. It was mainly boring colors and that is where my creative direction kicked in. I wanted the bottles to have a better design and style and from there I started working on the idea and trying to see what I could do, design-wise, to improve it and build the product and here I am today.” 



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:38% auto"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="683" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Adjei-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-50781 size-full" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Adjei-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Adjei-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Adjei-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Adjei-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Adjei-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
I remember going to see my manufacturer in Germany and they were holding a conference in Frankfurt and we got there and realized that the place was completely empty and that is where I saw how serious [Covid-19] was and how it would impact business. – P.Y. Adjei We
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But nobody could have foreseen the body blows of Covid-19.



&#8220;Brimms Bottles kicked off right at the beginning of the pandemic and I remember going to see my manufacturer in Germany and they were holding a conference in Frankfurt and we got there and realized that the place was completely empty and that is where I saw how serious this was and how it would impact business,” says Adjei. 



His problems were just about to begin. He experienced undue delays for the samples he had ordered of Brimms Bottles due to lockdowns implemented all over the world. 



“But we managed to work through that during the sample stage but finally when we got the final order in, that got delayed as well, taking about three to four months from China because of the pandemic,” says Adjei. 



Initially, the idea was to have his products at a few outlets such as cafes and were also meant for outdoor activities and travels, all of which were unduly affected by the pandemic. Now, he is leaning more towards the e-commerce aspect of the business. 



“I used my unique skills in terms of content creation and web design to make sure that my website works perfectly and to make sure I am working to get my products out there. “I am also branching into co-branding which allows a company or individual to create their bottles and co-brand along with mine so I am diversifying to give the bottles other avenues to survive,” says Adjei. 



Going digital is the only way forward for Adjei, Boateng, and many other startup entrepreneurs in the diaspora who had just begun on their journey in business, and have had to script their own rulebooks of survival. Their story is no different from their counterparts across the world. It’s one of grit, gumption and the fortitude to stay the course, no matter what.

Close-Up Of Small Shopping Boxes With Credit Card On Laptop

Survivors And Thrivers In Business

After more than a decade of trying to persuade authorities of the value of teaching entrepreneurship in schools, Lydia Zingoni, founder of the Teen Entrepreneur concept, is starting to make some headway.



By Nick Said



South Africa has targeted the creation of one million new entrepreneurs by 2030, but a schooling system, says Lydia Zingoni, weighed down by a lack of resources, infrastructure and a curriculum that focuses on traditional subject matter makes that seemingly a pipe dream.



Zingoni, founder of the Teen Entrepreneur concept, is hoping to change that and after more than a decade of trying to persuade authorities of the value of teaching entrepreneurship in schools, is starting to make some headway.



“The person you want in 2030 to be creating a business is likely in school at this time somewhere in South Africa,” Zingoni tells FORBES AFRICA. “You need to reach them now in order to create that mindset and begin to build the support structure around them.”&nbsp;



Zingoni, who was born in Zimbabwe but has lived and worked in London and now Cape Town for almost three decades, is hoping to revolutionize this space in South Africa and beyond its borders to across the African continent. &nbsp;



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“I came to realize this need when I was working for CPUT [Cape Peninsula University of Technology] as the director of information and libraries, and four young people came to my office and said, ‘look, we know we are not going to get jobs, we want information [on opening their own business].



“This was back in 2006 when internet resources and opportunities [for online learning] were obviously far less developed.”



Zingoni recognized a growing desire among young people to cut their own path in business, but there was little practical support from institutions.&nbsp;



She also believed these learnings should start much earlier, before tertiary education, and that schools would be an essential breeding ground for entrepreneurs.



She stepped up her plans in 2009 to form Teen Entrepreneur, a non-profit organization, and went to the Department of Education to push for a program in schools that would expose learners to the idea of entrepreneurship and help them develop their concepts.



“They were not really interested, they said, ‘science and maths is really what is important, entrepreneurship is not what we are focussing on’. So I decided to go it alone and left CPUT to create Teen Entrepreneur, which has involved advocating and creating programs to support young people in developing business ideas and skills.”



The plan is to create entrepreneur ‘societies’ in schools where learners can develop their own ideas and get the support they need to turn them into practical businesses.



“It is easier said than done,” Zingoni admits. “You can go to a school and talk to the kids for 10 minutes in assembly, but then what? You are not going to convince them that way.”



Zingoni instead approached schools to create a lesson outside of normal hours with up to 50 learners taking part. But it has been painstaking work.&nbsp;



“We have a program that has 11 modules, but the core is how do you come up with a business idea. If you are in Khayelitsha [a township in South Africa’s Western Cape province] or wherever, it is not just in major centers where entrepreneurship is an option.&nbsp;



“Look within your local community, use your passion and talent to see how you can solve your own community’s problems. Obviously, there is a social element to it, but it must have a financial gain to convince young people that entrepreneurship is an option.”



Teen Entrepreneur also hosts weekend programs, monthly indabas and conferences that are in addition to the work they do in schools.



“It has been a slow process. Very slow in fact. The hardest thing has been convincing policy-makers that we need to expose young people to an entrepreneurial mindset and culture.



But we are getting to where we want to be, although obviously the Covid-19 pandemic has set us back this past year,” Zingoni says.



“We are now working with the Eastern Cape government, who love our program. The Department of Education is also now finally running what they call the E3 program [Entrepreneurship, Education, Employability] and they have partnered with us on this. That has given us access to all South African [government] schools. If there was no Covid, we would have already rolled out that program.”



But the reach into schools across the country presents a massive logistical challenge, and that is where Teen Entrepreneur has turned to technology.



“If we went into every school, it would mean I am in charge of 27,000 teachers who will present the program,” Zingoni says. “Then multiply that by may be 50 learners in each program… it is a massive reach.



“In 2016, we decided to create a digital platform for the program, where we could refer the teachers to the portal [to get the information they need]. It took until 2019 to find a partner to assist us, and that was the University of Cape Town’s computer department.



“Schools can now get all the information they need online and create their own entrepreneurship societies in that environment.”



Zingoni says the program grapples with topics very much relevant to the world of today. &nbsp;&nbsp;



“Sustainability, the environment and climate change are factors we delve into, and it is about creating businesses that are cognizant of these issues.”



She adds they have already received interest from outside of South Africa in their program, and the decision to go digital has opened other doors.



“This is not just a South African issue, it is an African problem,” she says. “We have had interest from Tanzania, Kenya, Togo… now you can learn online, it is possible to have the program in these countries and it costs nothing to take part.”

Category: Entrepreneurs

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